Image resolution in video processing and display systems keeps increasing. With the video quality evolving from standard definition to high definition, and further toward super high definition, the bandwidth and power consumption used in video processing results in a bottleneck. For example, the increased resolution consumes more bandwidth of the network and also challenges the communication throughput of internal computer memory.
Many video processing algorithms exploit inter-frame correlations, which means the encoder uses information from other frames to compress a current frame. This requires that frames of the video be stored in memory such that the frames can be referenced during video compression. This may require high-speed dynamic random access memory (DRAM) external to the processing unit to store the required reference frames. As frame resolution increases, the DRAM bandwidth as well as power consumption results in more serious bottlenecks. More DRAM bandwidth is used to transfer the larger frames from memory to the video processing unit. Further, processing the larger frames also uses more power.